Seagate or Western Digital?

This was about the only forum I found appropriate, but this isn't game related.

I'm looking at long term storage drives that likely won't be accessed very often. This has become a pressing matter as my current drives are quickly reaching capacity and I just had a primary OS drive just give me the SMART failure flag (with the only available replacement being an existing in-use backup drive). For reference, the drive that died was a 10yr/o WD and that seems to be the key mark for drives as I've had three internal PATA/IDEs die at the 10-12yr point in the last couple years.

Currently, I have/had a redundant system of twin internal 500Gb PATA drives that held my 2nd copy of the handful of various smaller 2.5" SATA internal and external drives. I pondered a hybrid drive, but I don't need the speed and limited capacity. I'm a little concerned about OS compatability so drive capacity, while I'd love some >2.5Gb, has made this a little tricky.

Right now I 'think' I'm split between WD Caviar Green and Baracuda Green drive models as they seem to be what I'm looking for. WD has this neat twin drive setup that can be configured to RAID Mirroring (the type I'd probably want for archives?), but it's an external and I'm not sure what the transfer speeds would be like (likely using USB 3.0) for large backups. For that matter, I'm wondering if I should instead go either internal (w/ possibly RAID again) or use one of those drive cube things that you put your own drives into (NAS/SAS?).

Are there any magic numbers (required storage + defrag padding space perhaps?) or new drive specs I should know about? I noticed that all self-enclosed external drives have that virtual partition crap, but with big enough drives partitioning likely won't be a necessity. It also looks like 4k partition schemes are likely mandatory at this point, but I suppose I could keep the existing smaller drives for use with any old OS's I tinker with to be safe as I'll likely stick with Win 7 x64 (and maybe Lion at some point farther in the future).

I guess I should give a current list of archive stats. And after getting this far I'll likely need two solutions even because as of right now I'm actually maintaining a combined set of archives for 3 PCs and a PS3 (which has its own dedicated drive so I'm not worried).
Ok, here's my archive map:

ISO Drive: 198Gb/320Gb Used, Contains my massive archive of MSDNAA software, any and all purchased software that wasn't in the form of physical media, an ISO copy of every OS I have a physical copy of, any utility software I've ever downloaded and found useful, and any and all updates to the mentioned software that I find down the line.

Archive Drive: 251Gb/500Gb Used, Contains 10Gb of archived school work, bills, medical docs, etc; 5Gb of "to be purchased" (when I find the appropriate CDs) MP3s; 300Mb of active documents; 30.5Gb of 320kps CD-MP3s (a digital version of the CD binder); 30Gb of pictures (with the chance to easily triple as soon as I get the archiving project funded); 167Gb of videos (same details as the pictures, but NO PORN!); and misc other things like to be decided downloads, tiny cache of yet to be read eBooks, etc. The pic/vid archives alone account for most of the storage space used and may need to simply become a separate solution, allowing my normal archives (digicam pics/vids, etc) to be split since they're much smaller footprint wise.

Backup Drive: 50Gb+/60Gb Used, Contains the combined installation backups (clean OS and post software installation versions) for each of the three computers. Originally it was stored on the 320 Gb drive and running low, but seeing as how I lost the primary laptop and slimed down to a single OS I was able to trim the backups....for now. I actually have need to keep this drive empty for when the day comes that my PS3 ever has to be repaired (way) out of warranty.

Car Audio: 60Gb+/120Gb Used, Contains the ISOs, down coded versions of, and Roxio template files for my car Data MP3 collection. Basically it houses the down-sampled music that's played in my car in such a way that if a CDR gets damaged/lost or I purchase new music, then all I have to do is update the ISOs/templates and re-rip a CDR.

So....yeah, I'm pushing my luck now that I've lost half of my redundancy.

Honestly. Personal preference.
Some people will swear by Seagate. Others by WD.
Personally, I'm a WD-boy. I've had exactly ONE drive of their fail on my in the last 30+ years. And that was a drive that did 24x7 NAS duty for nigh on 8 years.

Also, on the hybrid drives. "Limited capacity"?
Seagate's hybrids are 500GB and 750GB. Yes, the flash cache on them is much smaller. Now I wouldn't recommend it for use in your storage array. But if you're looking for a primary drive, and don't want to spend for a straight SSD, it's a nice option.

A pair of these would basically triple your total storage space.

If those are a bit too "spendy" for you, a pair of these will double your total storage space.

Honestly, I'd recommend going for the larger ones if you can afford it. You're not REALLY space-crunched yet. But backups have a way of accelerating in growth the longer you keep them. A 3GB RAID1 would probably keep you in free space longer.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

If you're looking for redundancy, yeah, I think a self-built setup would probably be a better idea. You CAN buy RAID-enabled devices, but they're usually somewhat pricey and somewhat painful to get running.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

On the issue of Seagate and WD. There both good. And they rotate which one is better alot even down to certain drives. For now though WD has seemed to have less failures for me. Also don't get discouraged if you get a DOA drive it seems with these big drives there are alot more runs of DOA but that is just the fact of making these drives. I would also say internal better then external. External can be nice but it is just safer to go internal and you can even make your own external drive which is way more customizable and better. Sata is just made for external, well it screams on how easy. I have a WD caviler green it works great.

Um my understanding is that it is a bad idea to raid the green drives. There meant to sit idle more often and haven't be reinforced to run high speeds alot and be accessed and written alot. Aka what I am saying is that raiding said drives will burn them out way way faster cause raid will use the drive highly.

Oh and personally I don't see the point of getting a drive smaller then 500gb anymore, it is just so cheap and common.

Go Western Digital.

Of course, we will all be moving to SSDs soon anyways.

If you don't care about being supported on non-Windows platforms (using NTFS is a bit questionable anyways... but using FAT32 just seems wrong for your 'backups'!), you could simply buy 2 cheap external drives, and then have Windows create a software raid.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hyperstrike Not for mass storage we won't.

Yeppers

SSDs might very well take over the market of what ships on the majority of machines as the primary drive in the next few years (except low ends, like the ones that ship with Celeron garbage), but it'll be quite a long time before you see 1TB+ capacities that beat the GB/$ value of a rust bucket.

It's likely the storage market will stay fragmented for many years, unless a hot new technology comes in and obsoletes both rust buckets and SSDs (Memresistor-based storage is one of those 5-10 year technologies that promise to change the world... it stinks of a perpetual 5-10 year technology, though).

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Actually we may not. Flash memory has a distinct problem. As transistor size goes down, so does transistor durability. This isn't a problem YET. But it's going to become one in another couple die shrinks.

Basically flash drives are hitting right now because they CAN and because it makes sense, even if it's still in the luxury category.

But in a few years they're going to be stuck unless a different type of storage memory can be found that's more durable.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

That barrier still appears to be a fair distances away (people have claimed wrongly about the barrier in the past, labs have already broken the latest supposed barrier), so with the past trends, it should get close to the point of overtaking the smaller size drives, which still seem to be oddly common on machines the major OEMs ship. Then again, that same cheapness will probably cause them to continue shipping the cheapest item they can possibly find, regardless of how little it improves their margins.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

The problem Hyper is talking about is as flash size decreases (density goes up) the number of erase cycles decreases, steeply at times. This means SSD lifespans decrease. There are some ways to firm it up some, additional memory set aside for over-provisioning for example. It's one of the reasons enterprise class SSDs are much more expensive than the ones for general consumption.

The number of erase cycles has actually been remaining steady with the last generation shrink. It's also influenced by the quality of the process.

There's also quite a number of different ways to boost the longevity even at a given number of erase cycles... the companies investing countless dollars into this tech wouldn't be doing so if they thought it had five years left before it hit an insurmountable wall.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

We'll see more "Hybrid" drives first.

Certainly server side the mechanical HDs won't go away anytime soon. The consumer market will probably move to SSDs only for lappys and Hybrid drives for Desktops.

Offsite storage for bulk data will eventually be more accepted.